Industrial coffee grinders have been well-known for a number of years. They frequently comprise one or more coffee-grinder sections, which may be stacked, above a conveyor. The mixer, which may comprise a screw conveyor, blends and conveys the ground coffee through a screw conveyor section to a mixer-discharge section. The mixer-discharge section may contain paddles as well as partition plates.
Industrial coffee grinder-mixer assemblies are frequently intended to be used to grind and blend two grades of coffee for packaging. The two grades are known as high yield (generally about 13 ounces to the can) and regular yield sixteen ounces to the can, each which provides a generally equal number of cups of coffee for the user.
To produce high yield coffee, it is necessary to blend and convey the ground coffee through the mixer without re-compacting it.
Because typical grinder-mixer assemblies are configured such that they typically re-compact ground coffee to produce regular yield coffee, the mixers must be "modified" each time they are to be switched over to the production of high yield coffee, such as by removing partition walls, by opening alternative outlets, and the like. With currently available machines this requires down-time and the intervention of mechanics, and is troublesome. Accordingly, many users of such machines require separate machines and set-ups for the production of each of high yield and regular yield ground coffees.
It would be of substantial advantage to provide a "universal" grinder-mixer machine and method for alternatively producing high yield and regular yield ground coffees which would not require alteration of the machine or the intervention of mechanics to switch over the machine from the production of one such ground coffee to the other.